Pay Attention to Your E-mail List

A couple of weeks ago I received an e-mail. It wasn’t addressed to me specifically but it was not a phishing attempt cause the sender wasn’t asking me to do anything. The e-mail went something like this;

 

“Hey Party People!

 

We had a great time at the party last night. Big thanks to all of our friends who came and to the DJ. It was a great time!

 

Have a great weekend!

 

Jim and Phil”

 

There were more details in the e-mail and the sender’s names weren’t Jim or Phil, I’m just giving you the gist of what was in the e-mail. I need to make clear that I do not know these people and I deleted the e-mail cause it had nothing to do with me. My thing is this, I could see EVERYONE this person had e-mailed! If I were a villain of some variety I would look at this like penny’s from heaven and take this mailing list and Scam the heck out of all of them.

 

I’m not, to be clear. I wrote the sender an e-mail back informing him that I thought I was on the e-mail listing by mistake.

 

This calls into light something that I feel is a best practice when e-mailing large groups of people. I totally get what it’s like when you’re feeling good about an event that just happened and you want to thank everyone for what they did or how it all went well. It’s important to remember that we all make mistakes, and one of those mistakes could be entering in the e-mail of someone who is not meant to be on your list.

 

The problem that I saw right off the bat was that the person who had e-mailed me along with the others was that I could see all of the e-mail addresses of everyone else they’d sent the e-mail to. This, for any hacker or phisher, is like pennies from heaven. There were 20 or 30 people on the list that got sent out so you could imagine how easily someone who was far more villainous than I am could take this list and pepper everyone on it with e-mails to get into their accounts and wreak all kinds of havoc.

 

The simplest solution for this is something that has been a quick and simple function, the Blind Carbon Copy. The easiest way to ensure that everyone in a group e-mail gets your e-mail but is not sent your entire mailing list is to BCC everyone you’re sending the e-mail to. This ensures the privacy of the people who are getting your e-mail and it also guarantees that if you accidentally send the e-mail to someone you don’t mean to, they won’t see anyone else on the list.

 

Like with any other e-mail, you have to “send” it to someone. What I do is I send it to myself. This way I am able to see what the people receiving my e-mail see. A message from me, to me, and no one else’s e-mails. This means that if for whatever reason someone receives your e-mail by accident the only action that he or she can take is to reply to me saying “Um…This isn’t for me.”

 

The important thing to remember here is that this was an accident, and was sent to someone who wouldn’t do anything malicious with the e-mails that were received (that would be me, to be clear). If this innocent e-mail were to have been sent, again accidentally, to someone who would do something malicious with it, then the people who were on that e-mail would have no idea what hit them. It’s important to recognize that in this age of information security and privacy that making sure that people’s e-mails are secured.

 

 

Do you send many mass e-mails? Would you consider Bcc’ing people from now on?